Showing posts with label Brainworks. Show all posts

Real-time control of wheelchairs with brain waves

Look ma no hands!

Sorry couldn´t resist that.
June 29th and wheelchairs can now be operated by the user´s brainwaves at 125 miliseconds, moments faster than what was currently available and a 95% accuracy rate. You´d want that, if you want to apply this in the future for handicapped people or the old and frail.
The chair can operate with simple directions in the forward, left and right directions.

This technology comes not long after a wheelchair was developed late last year in 2008 by the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, that operates by movements of the tongue via a magnet tracker. Video here.

The brainwave operated wheelchair was a joint project by Toyota , the Genesis Research Centre and the BSI-Tokyota Collaboration Centre.
More here.
Whitts

If I had just one superpower, as stupid and small scale as it sounds, I would want to be able to take photos just by blinking my eyes. (the other powers would include to be able to cure cancer and create world peace etc..)

I´d like to think I´d be a famous oddball photographer by now, but those dreams were shattered when someone, I like to call him ¨No way Jose¨, asked how I´d share said photos in my brain with other people. I don´t know Jose, ask a hypethetical question, get a hypothetical answer!

Ha! Science has finally caught up my friend..

Back in May this year, scientists figured out a way to reproduce an image that a person looks at by monitoring the person´s brainwaves!

The research group of Yukiyasu Kamitani, head of the Department of Neuroinformatics at the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International, were the pioneers of this technology.

¨When people look at something,...neurons in the visual cortex reproduce the visual information in the shape of the image within the brain.¨say the researchers.

It works by monitoring the oxygen and blood levels in the brain after neurons are activated in the visual cortex.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) this data can reconstruct the image the person has seen.

The only drawback is that it´s kinda blurry with more complex images and hard to figure out unless you know what the image was before hand.

Dang.Foiled again..But for how long?

ZiA